Blog Stories

Getting a hotel marketing budget approved takes more than presenting a list of campaigns and estimated expenses. Owners and asset managers want to understand how marketing investments contribute to revenue, support occupancy goals, and improve profitability. This article explains how hotel marketers can use guest data, historical performance, revenue attribution, and ROI reporting to build a stronger business case for their marketing budgets. It also covers how to identify op

Your hotel's marketing team can develop the best campaigns, invest in sophisticated CRM technology, and create personalized guest journeys. But the success of those efforts often depends on something much simpler: the information collected when a guest checks in. Accurate hotel guest data collection helps properties recognize returning guests, improve segmentation, deliver relevant communications, and build stronger relationships after checkout. Incomplete records, outdated c

Holiday marketing often focuses on room promotions, but hotels have other opportunities to generate revenue. Gift cards, dining, spa services, local experiences, meeting space, and extended stays can all contribute to seasonal revenue. With targeted email marketing and automated guest journeys, hotels can promote these offerings to past guests, local residents, and upcoming arrivals. HMA Intelligent Marketing helps properties use guest data and segmentation to identify the ri

Managing marketing across a hotel portfolio creates an interesting challenge. Corporate teams need consistency, visibility, and efficiency, while individual properties still need the flexibility to market around their own demand patterns, guest mix, geography, events, and revenue goals. Effective multi-property hotel marketing campaigns require a structure that connects portfolio-wide planning with property-level execution. That includes a shared marketing calendar, clear bra

Holiday campaigns often get most of the attention during planning season. Offers, creative, subject lines, send dates, and booking windows all matter. But the quality of the data behind those campaigns has a much larger role in determining who receives the message, how relevant it is, and what the hotel can learn from the results. Guest profiles, stay history, booking behavior, geography, repeat visitation, and household information can help marketers build campaigns around r

Cyber Season can generate a lot of attention for hotel marketing teams, but the campaign itself is only one piece of the work. Your guest database needs to be ready. Segments need to be built. Automations need to know what happens after someone clicks, books, abandons, or does nothing. Landing pages need to work. Tracking needs to work. Emails need to render correctly. Suppression logic needs to be checked. And all of that should happen before the first Cyber offer goes live.

A hotel marketing calendar should do more than organize email sends, promotions, social campaigns, and seasonal offers. It should help the property generate demand when demand is needed, support revenue management goals, and make better use of the guest data already sitting in the CRM and PMS. Building an effective hotel marketing calendar starts with understanding the property's occupancy patterns, booking behavior, local demand drivers, historical guest activity, and period

The U.S. economy is still growing, but growth has slowed and consumers remain concerned about purchasing power, employment, and everyday costs. Travel demand has not disappeared. Travelers are adjusting how they plan, where they go, how long they stay, and what convinces them to book. For hotels, the 2026 fall travel trends will likely favor domestic trips, shorter getaways, shoulder-season value, flexible booking options, and offers targeted to specific guest interests. Blac

Hotel websites bring in valuable traffic every day. Potential guests browse rooms, compare dates, check rates, start reservations, and, very often, leave before they book. That abandoned booking activity has immense value. That value is lost if your booking recovery program isn't working or is non-existent. HMA’s Boomerang hotel booking recovery helps hotels reconnect with travelers who start the booking process but do not finish. Boomerang identifies abandoned bookings in re

Hotel marketing operations depend on more than campaign strategy. When front desk capture, reservations tagging, PMS data, and property execution are disconnected, marketing teams lose the guest data they need for segmentation, automation, reporting, and repeat guest marketing.

Hotel marketing platforms can give your team access to CRM tools, email builders, automations, and reports. That access matters, but it does not automatically solve the technical and operational work required to run a healthy hotel marketing program. HMA acts as a fractional hotel marketing partner for hotels, resorts, and management groups that need deeper support behind the scenes. That includes continuous DNS alignment, deliverability monitoring, Google Postmaster Tools re

Mid-year is the right time to clean up your hotel CRM before fall planning, holiday campaigns, and budget conversations begin.

Repeat guest identification should not live in a report that someone may or may not open. It should show up where it matters. At the front desk. In housekeeping. With room service. In the morning operations meeting. In the hands of the people responsible for making the guest experience feel personal, polished, and prepared. That is where HMA’s Valet VIP program comes in. Valet helps hotel teams identify repeat guests, high-value guests, and VIP arrivals before they reach the

Your ability to market, personalize, and drive direct revenue depends on the data you actually own. First-party data is the foundation. It feeds your CRM, supports segmentation, improves deliverability, and gives you control over the guest relationship. Many hotels still rely too heavily on OTA data, partial guest profiles, or outdated records. That creates gaps. It limits what you can do with automation, AI, and lifecycle marketing. This post breaks down five practical ways

Same-Time-Last-Year campaigns give hotels a reliable way to turn past guests into repeat revenue. You are not trying to create demand. You are reconnecting with guests at the exact moment they previously chose to travel. That timing matters. It aligns with habit, memory, and intent. When the message reflects the experience they already had, engagement increases and booking friction drops. This is one of the most efficient lifecycle programs a hotel can run. What Is a Same-Tim

OTA winback strategies for hotels are shifting. The fundamentals still work, but the environment around them has changed. AI is now influencing how guests discover, compare, and book. OTAs are tightening their position in that process. If you rely on OTA bookings and do not have a structured winback strategy, you are giving away repeat revenue. This roadmap breaks down what is changing, what is not, and how to build OTA winback strategies that convert in today’s environment.

Smarter targeting drives engagement, deliverability, and direct bookings without sending more emails. Many hotels still believe revenue growth requires sending more emails. Often, it requires sending fewer, but smarter. If your idea of “CRM strategy” is still batch and blast to the entire database, you are working harder, paying more, and getting less than you should. Why “Batch and Blast” Is Quietly Taxing Your Revenue The old playbook was simple: send every campaign to eve

Summer’s coming fast, and the forecast isn’t exactly smooth sailing. Demand’s here, but it’s shifting in all kinds of ways. Airfares are jumping, booking windows are shrinking, and flexibility is the new must-have. The next two months really matter. What you do now will set the tone (and the revenue) for your summer season. Let’s take a look at what’s actually happening - and what you can do about it. STR Snapshot: Growth Is There, But It’s Uneven The national travel trend nu

Email hygiene for hotels is not optional maintenance. It is the ongoing process of removing invalid, risky, and unengaged email addresses that quietly damage inbox placement and direct booking revenue. Most CRMs and PMS platforms do not detect these threats. Clean data protects margin.

Email marketing still does more work for hotels than nearly any other channel. It reaches past algorithms, keeps the relationship direct, and turns anonymous browsing into booked revenue.